Audio editing techniques are well-known in the prior art. For example, in analog audio editing, sections of a recorded analog signal are simply "cut" and "spliced" together. The creation of digital audio allowed this cut and splice operation to be "smoothed over" through the use of an averaging technique wherein audio samples on either side of a splice point are averaged together. Such techniques, however, result in undesirable signal discontinuities which introduce audible clicks or pops during signal playback.
Recently, "intelligent" digital audio editing techniques have been developed which facilitate selection of splice points along a sequence of digital samples representing an audio signal. In such techniques, a desired splice point is selected by an operator. A processor-based system is then utilized to scan subsequent samples for a sample close to this splice point satisfying various slope, slope change, noise, or RMS level criteria. Although this approach has produced an improved product as compared to prior methods, the criteria selection schemes employed thereby are too easily affected by noise or by the normal signal fluctations in speech.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved technique for selecting splice points along a sequence of analog or digital samples that preserves the general waveshape of the audio signal after editing, and which is relatively unaffected by noise and normal signal fluctuations in speech.